Semiclassical trajectory perspective of glory rescattering in strong-field photoelectron holography

Abstract

We investigate theoretically the photoelectron momentum distribution (PMD) of the ionized atoms irradiated by a linearly polarized intense laser, focusing on the holography interference patterns in PMD that carry important information of the initial wavefunction of a tunneled electron and its experienced atomic potential in rescattering. With the help of Dyson series and semiclassical propagator, we calculate the scattering amplitudes in the cylindrical coordinate representation. In contrast to conventional recognitions that the photoelectron holography is the interference of two branches of electron trajectories, however, we find strikingly that infinite semiclassical trajectories can be deflected by the combined Coulomb potential and laser field into the same final momentum: The initial momenta are found to be distributed on a ring-shape curve in the transverse momentum plane and the initial positions of these trajectories are perpendicular to their initial momentum vectors. For the zero final transverse momentum, the above ring-source trajectories degenerate into the point-source axial caustic trajectories (or Glory trajectories) and the quantum interference of these trajectories will dramatically alter the scattering amplitudes that is termed as Glory rescattering effect. With following Berry's spirit of uniform approximation for Glory scattering in optics, we can finally derive a uniform formulation of the rescattering amplitude in the Bessel functions for the strong-field photoelectron holography (SFPH) patterns. Our results are in good agreement with solutions of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation and can account for recent photoelectron holography experiments. Important applications of our theory are also discussed.